Rugged Individualism and politics

David Brooks today sidesteps any specific commentary on the McCain/Palin race this week in the NY Times. The wimp*. Still, it's an interesting rumination on the strain of tough, conservative individualism and how this has been superseded by what we now know about human nature according to Brooks.

If there’s a thread running through the gravest current concerns, it is that people lack a secure environment in which they can lead their lives. Wild swings in global capital and energy markets buffet family budgets. Nobody is sure the health care system will be there when they need it. National productivity gains don’t seem to alleviate economic anxiety. Inequality strains national cohesion. In many communities, social norms do not encourage academic achievement, decent values or family stability. These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom.

And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: “Throw a voucher at it.” Schools are bad. Throw a voucher. Health care system’s a mess. Replace it with federally funded individual choice. Economic anxiety? Lower some tax rate.

He then points out that this paradigm does not cover the Fannie/Freddie bailout and goes on:

The irony, of course, is that, in pre-Goldwater days, conservatives were incredibly sophisticated about the value of networks, institutions and invisible social bonds. You don’t have to go back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (though it helps) to find conservatives who understood that people are socially embedded creatures and that government has a role (though not a dominant one) in nurturing the institutions in which they are embedded.

That language of community, institutions and social fabric has been lost, and now we hear only distant echoes — when social conservatives talk about family bonds or when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.

A critique of conservatism as it is now from within. But is this conservatism? Many conservative pundits seem intent on defining conservatism by reading anyone whose views they don't like out of the movement. But that doesn't leave much left except perhaps the conservative flavor of the season.

*one man's wimp is another man's sage.